"The form of a bier, on which rests something covered with a pall, that may be supposed to be a coffin; with a mourner at the head and one at the foot?" she whispered. He bowed his head again: very gravely. "Then I saw it last night. I did indeed. I was sitting under the ash-trees, and I saw a strange shadow in the moonlight that I had never seen before----" "Where?" he interrupted. "In that wild-looking part of the grounds as you look across from the ash-trees. Just in front of the archway, where the ground is bare. It was there. Mr. Verrall says he wonders Sir George does not have those gorse-bushes cleared away, and the ground converted into civilized land, like the rest of it." "It has been done, but the bushes grow again." "Well, I was sitting there, and I saw this unusual shadow. It arrested my eye at once. Where did it come from, I wondered: what cast it? I never thought of the Ashlydyat superstition; never for a moment. I only thought what a strange appearance the shadow wore. I thought of a lying-in-state; I thought of a state funeral, where the coffin rests on a bier, and a mourner sits at the head and a mourner at the foot. Shall I tell you," she suddenly broke off, "what the scene altogether looked like?" "Do so." "Like a graveyard. They may well call it the Dark Plain! The shadow might be taken for a huge tomb with two images weeping over it, and the bushes around assumed the form of lesser ones. Some, square; some, long; some, high; some, low; but all looking not unlike graves in the moonlight." "Moonlight shadows are apt to bear fanciful forms to a vivid imagination, Miss Pain," he lightly observed. "Have not others indulged the same fancy before me? I remember to have heard so." "As they have said. They never took the form to my sight," he returned, with a half-smile of ridicule. "When I know bushes to be bushes, I cannot by any stretch of imagination magnify them into graves. You must have had this Ashlydyat nonsense in your head." "I have assured you that I had not," she rejoined in a firm tone. "It was only after I had been regarding it for some time--and the longer I looked, the plainer the shadow seemed to grow--that I thought of the Ashlydyat tale. All in an instant the truth flashed upon me--that it must be the apparition----" "The _what_, Miss Pain?" "Does the word offend you? It _is_ a foolish one. The Shadow, then. I remembered that the Shadow, so dreaded by the Godolphins, did take the form of a bier, with mourners weeping at its----" "Was said to take it," he interposed, in a tone of quiet reproof; "that would be the better phrase. And, in speaking of the Shadow being dreaded by the Godolphins, you allude, I presume, to the Godolphins of the past ages. I know of none in the present who dread it: except my superstitious sister, Janet."